1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for transmitting critical communications to a plurality of communication recipients and more particularly to an adaptable system and method that can receive critical communication data and recipient contact information from a remotely networked client, contact a plurality of recipients using multiple delivery media, confirm its contact with the recipients' interfaces and deliver the critical communications to the recipients.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Oftentimes, organizations both large and small need to send a critical communication to groups of employees, end-users, customers or families. Sometimes the critical communication relates to matters requiring immediate notice, such as the closing of a school or plant for one reason or another. Other times, the critical communication may concern an emergency situation, such as a severe weather warning. These situations require speed and accuracy to address an urgent matter. However, sometimes organizations simply want to simultaneously pass good news, such as the company's exceptional performance results, to a large group of employees or investors. Until the present invention, however, the ability to easily and quickly deliver voice and/or text messages to predefined and customized calling lists, on the fly, with special information as needed, was unavailable.
The prior art is filled with systems for delivering messages that are simply inadequate for broad dissemination of a critical communication. For example, when an emergency has occurred at a school and the students must be sent home immediately, the school staff must typically search for emergency contact information for each of the students and place hundreds of separate calls, which is vastly inefficient and time consuming. An announcement can be delivered to a local radio station for public address, but the parents may not be listening to the radio, let alone one or more particular stations. In the end, few parents are quickly reached and the message will not reach every parent.
E-mail has the capability of delivering a message to several individuals, but it requires the individuals to access a computer device to receive the message. When some of the individuals are in their cars, at work outdoors, or simply away from their computers, the e-mail message will simply sit in an inbox, unread. Moreover, e-mail communications cannot convey voice messages or other audible tones, unless the end-user provides a receiving device that is capable of converting a text message to an audible message. If the e-mail address is no longer good, or the e-mail simply goes undelivered for countless other reasons, the individual sending the message may or may not receive a reply that the message was not delivered. Regardless, redundant contacts are not available on e-mail mailing lists, let alone contacts for multiple media types, such as phones, pagers, fax machines, etc. More importantly, the individual sending the message cannot draft and send an e-mail to recipients if the individual does not have access to a computer device. A new system is needed that is able to make use of e-mail as one of a plurality of media platforms, using multiple contacts for each contact recipient so that the shortcomings of any one media platform or contact does not prevent a timely and accurate transmission of the critical communication.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system that is capable of delivering personalized, time-critical communications to groups of any size from a handful to many millions, on demand, anywhere, at any time. Such a system must also provide the flexibility of using various media platforms for both the messenger and the message recipients.